The companies have allied to develop a content management infrastructure that will help organizations with multiple content management systems more easily integrate content into enterprise workflows.EMC Corp. and Adobe Systems Inc. have joined forces to develop a content management infrastructure that will help organizations with multiple content management systems more easily integrate content into enterprise workflows and access, exchange, manage and integrate structured and unstructured content.
The new infrastructure combines EMC/Documentum's content management platform with Adobe's XMP (Extensible Metadata Platform) while supporting the efforts of the Association for Information and Image Management (AIIM) to develop the iECM (Interoperable Enterprise Content Management) standard.
EMC, of Hopkinton, Mass., and Adobe Systems, of San Jose, Calif., are the first of the major vendors involved in the ongoing discussions surrounding iECM that have banded together to create more standardization around content management—a move that Kyle McNabb, a senior analyst at Cambridge, Mass.-based Forrester Research said is a good sign for the market.
"The market needs standards to emerge in content repository interoperability to address many of today's business requirements and, perhaps more importantly, spur the next round of application innovation," he said.
Although EMC and Adobe are the first major players taking this step toward interoperability, others—namely Microsoft, IBM, Oracle—surely will follow.
"They have all developed their own technologies, and the ECM market is highly fragmented," said Tony Byrne, editor and publisher of CMS Watch, an independent market analysis firm based in Silver Spring, Md. "The hope is that all of these vendors will participate in the iECM initiative—initially a set of global frameworks but ultimately some standards—because the typical large enterprise has multiple products from multiple companies, and they need better interoperability."
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In addition to being a necessity, standardizing the ECM landscape will have monetary and market share benefits for vendors in this space as well, McNabb said.
"Bringing together structured data, unstructured data, processes and end user context as an as-yet untapped area, and represents a large opportunity for existing and future vendors," he said.
Once all of the major ECM players have laid their cards on the table and the iECM initiative evolves into a standard or set of standards, the industry will be well on its way to accomplishing its goal, Byrne said.
"It's all about finding ways for users of these technologies to be able to have different systems that will play together to solve their business problems," he said. "If I have a records management system that's helping me maintain my authoritative electronic records, it should be able to reach into my other document repositories. Hopefully we can come up with some common approaches to allow things like that to happen more easily."
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